- RADIO ANNOUNCER: Good morning, Dallas.
We have a warm spring day in store,
clouds clearing by noontime.
It's 74 degrees, at six o'clock.
- BEN JONES: Quick huddle-up, just, real fast.
1, 2, 3. [camera clicks]
- NARRATOR: Each spring and fall, before sunrise,
a group of volunteers flocks to a Dallas parking lot.
- Just be really careful as we're crossing the roads.
We'll divide the route in half,
and then we'll meet in the center.
[car horn honks]
- NARRATOR: They're here to survey downtown buildings-
- Well, if we find any stunned birds,
we've got some canisters.
- NARRATOR: But their interest is birds.
- BEN: Sound good?
- VOLUNTEERS: Sounds good, yeah!
- Okay, let's do it.
[energetic music]
It'll be just a lot of walking for a while.
[laughs]
- NARRATOR: These volunteers are gathering valuable data,
about the impacts of city lights and buildings,
on migrating birds.
[energetic music]
- BEN: Anything?
[traffic roars]
Blue jay?
Okay, we've got a blue jay chick.
Thankfully, this isn't a collision issue.
That's just a little fledgling that's come out of the nest,
and I saw its mom right back here.
So, we'll let it be, and she'll keep feeding it
there on the ground.
We're headed out on a bird collision survey
through downtown Dallas, looking to see if we find any birds
that have hit buildings,
that have been drawn down by artificial light.
We're gonna document those birds,
and put 'em into a database for science.
[dramatic music]
This is an important conservation issue.
We lose up to one billion birds a year,
in the United States alone,
just from collisions,
so we have to take action on it.
Many bird species are in dramatic decline
because of loss of habitat and other issues,
and so to take action on this issue
is really important to save these birds.
So it's great to have a good crew out here
every morning that's trying to help out,
get the city darker,
and then document the collisions that we're finding,
so we know what's going on out there,
and we can do something about it.
A lot of times the strike zone will have planters, you know?
[dramatic music]
It's difficult to find a bird in something like this,
but if they're brightly colored, you know,
sometimes we can see 'em.
So, we're two buildings down,
and zero collisions, so far that we've documented.
It's the only bird walk
where you don't want to find any birds.
We get a lot of banana peels,
door stops,
dog poo.
With eyes like this, we can make anything into a bird.
- The other day, my youngest son looks down,
there was a hummingbird laying at the bottom of the fence.
He said, "What about this one?" [chuckles]
Sometimes kids have the best eyes. [laughs]
[hummingbird chirps]
A lot of people don't realize that there are birds
migrating at night.
It's a big migration zone for birds passing,
both in the spring and the fall.
If you think about before all these lights,
you have birds probably navigating by the constellations
and the moon.
Birds at night just can't help themselves but come down
into the city, and then they get confused by all the glass.
[dramatic music]
They see these trees reflected in the buildings,
especially mirrored glass,
and fly into the glass
thinking that they're landing in a tree.
And, unfortunately they're doing it 35 miles an hour,
so it's not a gentle strike, usually.
- BEN: Yeah, what do you think?
- So, it looks like we have
a Nashville warbler.
We have the yellow on the breast
and then its size gives it away that it's a warbler.
And then, we have an olive green on the back wings
and on its back.
And so, Alfonso and I are gonna bag it.
- At least we're finding and documenting the collision,
and we're gonna be able to use that data to help
make additional change in the city, and prevent collisions.
- On to look for more.
- It may seem like it's just one bird, but it all adds up.
So, this is a brown thrasher,
one of the larger birds that we find
aside from the waterfowl.
This one's been here a little bit longer.
It's an area we don't always come down to search,
along the skywalk.
And, if you think about the loss of one bird,
you've lost that bird,
and then every bird it would've produced that year,
and the following year, and its offspring.
- MIRANDA: There's another.
- TIM: Older bird, but it looks, like, maybe,
a blue grosbeak.
- MIRANDA: Yeah. - BEN: Blue grosbeak.
- TIM: Some of the songbirds
might have five nests here, and six young in each nest,
and that adds up to like 340-some birds,
just from the loss of that one bird.
[rhythmic music]
- It's pretty sad in the moment.
You just kind of have to tell yourself that
you're doing this to collect data, and, you know,
get these buildings to turn off their lights at night,
and prevent more collisions from happening.
- TIM: Anything in the 10 building study,
the data goes to the Cornell,
but all of the birds go to A&M,
so they're all getting used instead of discarded.
- RESEARCHER: Right?
- GARY: Mm-hm. - RESEARCHER: Okay.
- So, once those legs are out and you have it peeled down,
just a little bit... - Mm-hm.
- you can go ahead and do that.
We're in the biodiversity research
and teaching collection.
We have collections of birds, mammals, reptiles,
and amphibians, and fishes.
We've got, approaching 1.2 million specimens, collectively.
Specifically to birds, we're about to hit 30,000 specimens.
I would say that the bulk of our material
comes in from salvage programs.
- When specimens arrive here from the Lights Out Program,
they're frozen with their data,
and we put 'em into baskets
according to where they came from,
and, kind of, prioritize processing them into specimens
for our collection.
- GARY: Most recently, with the Lights Out program,
we've started to get hundreds and hundreds of birds
after each migratory period,
so a couple hundred in the fall
and a couple hundred in the spring.
- These are warbler specimens.
Most of them came from a major fallout event in 2017
in Galveston,
and 400 or so hit a building in the middle of the night
because the building's lights were on.
That kind of started our awareness program in Texas.
It made national news.
From there, kind of, our volunteer efforts across the
state started with awareness of lights off at night, you know,
when migration is happening, specifically.
- These are our 12 most common window strike species,
that we get from Lights Out,
and it spans more than just the songbirds.
[dramatic music]
- I am working on a yellow-breasted chat.
It's a salvage bird that hit a building in Dallas.
When the birds come here, we can then use them
for all sorts of different research projects.
- GARY: People will often ask for loans of tissue material,
to do genetic research.
- We can pull from here for them to do DNA analysis
on those specimens.
- Some people are interested in disease ecology
and they've asked for tissues to look at zoonotic diseases.
We teach labs here in the collections,
so it's not just research, it's also teaching,
and trying to develop that next generation of ecologists
and conservation biologists.
- HEATHER: And, that's one of the big Lights Out birds.
- GARY: We try to maximize each specimen.
We wanna make sure that they're used.
- MIRANDA: Wow, that's a fresh one.
- BEN: Where was he?
- This one was across the street over here,
the big glass there by that building.
An ovenbird.
They're in the warbler family.
- BEN: Large warbler.
- TIM: This species is just known
to strike glass a lot.
Somebody came up with the term super collider.
- We're trying to help prevent these kind of collisions
and hopefully with the data that we find here,
with the birds that we're able to find,
we're able to bring more awareness.
It's worth it, you know, at the end of the day,
everybody who's here loves wildlife,
and we're all doing this for a good cause,
to be able to help these birds make it safely home.
Today we're gonna break 200 birds so far this season.
- MEI LING LIU: It just really breaks my heart,
makes me sad.
We can do better.
[train whistle rings]
- BEN: All right.
- TIM: It's becoming a bigger and bigger topic.
More people are starting to pay attention to it,
and try to figure out what they can do to change glass,
and also change lighting.
- BEN: Texas is a globally important bird area
so when we take lights out action here
it has an exponential effect across the country.
It's important to take action at home as well
and our community has really rallied
around this to help save birds.
- As you can see, it's been,
unfortunately, a busy season.
Freezer is pretty full.
Five, six, seven deceased birds
and one stunned bird,
which we'll take and release.
We get quite a few each season that are stunned
or injured that we can release back into the wild.
The best part is being able to save what birds we can.
It's very rewarding
when you can just remove them away from the glass
and let them go off on their own and do their thing again.
[bird chirps and sings]